The Brazilian contribution to the study of the Schistosoma mansoni transcriptome

Brazilian scientists have made definitive contributions towards the understanding of the transcriptome of Schistosoma mansoni. The transcriptome, as a collection of expressed genes, was studied with two basic approaches, the sequencing of cloned cDNA ends and the production and sequencing of random fragments of cDNA. The data that was generated covers nearly the entire set of transcribed genes. These data have been important for gene discovery and annotation of gene function, annotation of the genome, construction of microarrays, identification of peptides in the study of the proteome and can be mined for splice variants, polymorphisms such as single nucleotide polymorphisms and microsatellites, for example. This review will describe the advances achieved with the contribution of Brazilian researchers to the understanding of the transcribed regions of the S. mansoni genome.